The Gaza Genocide: Another Massacre to Add to Britain’s List, With 15 Million Deaths Since 1945 |
Photo of a drawing by Magnus (pseudonym of Italian comic book artist Roberto Raviola) at Palazza del Fumetto Pordenone, Italy. Photo: Paul Cochrane.
Britain is no stranger to genocide. It has carried out many in the past, and today it is enabling another by being a willing participant in Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians. Britain wants to hide its crimes by concealing the truth about all the ways it’s helping Israel commit genocide: by sharing its airbases, its intelligence, and generous arms exports, and by providing political cover. It is also trying to silence any pro-Palestinian activism by deeming non-violent civil disobedience, as carried out by Palestine Action, as a terrorist act, with support for the group punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
This increasingly censorial and Draconian approach follows a well-thumbed textbook used by the British establishment to deny, downplay, spin or hide the country’s role in conflicts and occupations across the globe—both historically, and more recently, especially when acting as the USA’s wingman during the ‘War on Terror’ decades.
Britain’s decision to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the US, as Prime Minister Tony Blair famously put it in 2001, at the start of the War on Terror, led to an immense toll on human life, with direct and indirect deaths estimated at 4.5–4.7 million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Yet Britain’s warmongering and its contribution to this horrific death toll is not hammered home by the legacy media in the same way as Russia’s war on Ukraine or the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel. By not doing so, the media is able to manufacture consent for Britain’s participation in the ‘Forever Wars’, and stifle any serious public debate about why the country has such a militaristic foreign policy. The media not exposing the UK’s bloody track record also allows prime ministers to get away unchallenged with rhetoric such as current leader Keir Starmer saying that “Britain is united, with Israel, against terror, for international law and the protection of innocent lives.”
It was a rare admission by Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch as to why Britain is standing shoulder to shoulder with the US and Israel when she blurted out: “Israel is fighting a proxy war on behalf of the UK, just like Ukraine is on behalf of western Europe against Russia.” The proxy war is to “eliminate Hamas” and deal a blow to Britain’s “enemy”, Iran.
Such justification is couched in language that British politicians regularly used throughout its imperial empire, and Benjamin........